Minister Bruton to Prioritise Teaching of Foreign Languages

The Minister for Education and Skills Richard Bruton said at the TUI conference, Ireland should benchmark itself against the best English-speaking country in the world for foreign languages and aim to emulate that performance within a decade.
Minister Bruton also said that we should aim to be within the top ten in Europe in this area. He was speaking ahead of the publication of his Department’s ten year strategy for foreign languages, a key commitment in the Action Plan for Education. The plan acknowledges that in general, Ireland, in common with other English-speaking countries, has not, prioritised learning of foreign languages when compared to other countries, tending to regard English as a common international language of communication.

I believe that Minister Bruton is genuine in this, but language teaching is seriously fúcktarded in Ireland. The teaching of the Irish Language has got to rank as the greatest scandal/failure in Western European education and possibly worldwide history! If it's not, what is? This more or less follows through to other language teaching.
My French Teacher was French born and I would say that any French born and fluent 3rd level graduate who had done the equivalent of a French 1 month TEFL well FEFL in that case, would be at least as good as him, if not streets ahead in their abilty to teach. In fact, he was also one of the few teachers, I saw in secondary school, (it was very common in primary school) hit a child a smash in the face!
One easy thing which can be done is that along with TV5, channels such as ZDF, ARD, TVE, RAI should all be available on cable tv!
Another issue is tehnological advances, Yes, I know, the calculator did not do away with mathematicians, but a universal translator will make an imbecile manager think he knows as much as a native speaker of another language.
Also the director of one of the French Language Institutes told me we get honours university graduates in French coming to us and they cannot put 2 words together, which does not surprise me!
And of course re jobs a lot of jobs which require fluency in another European Language are being advertised by chancer employers for around €18K-€21K, which is absolutely outrageous!

Putting the European State run stations on cable would be a great idea, its the least they can do to justify their licence fees.

The problem is languages are introduced too late, my solution would be to pick a number of bigger schools and introduce a foreign langue from when they start primary and not have primary teachers teach it obviously.
My kids go to a school that's has an international focus, so they only start Irish in 5th class, by Leaving Cert they do reasonably well compared other Dublin schools big lol so kind of shows up the Irish system as being a bit crap meanwhile they have an A in the bag for their European language because the foreign language exams are so easy for them

Putting the European State run stations on cable would be a great idea, its the least they can do to justify their licence fees.

The problem is languages are introduced too late, my solution would be to pick a number of bigger schools and introduce a foreign langue from when they start primary and not have primary teachers teach it obviously.
My kids go to a school that's has an international focus, so they only start Irish in 5th class, by Leaving Cert they do reasonably well compared other Dublin schools big lol so kind of shows up the Irish system as being a bit crap meanwhile they have an A in the bag for their European language because the foreign language exams are so easy for them

AFAIK you can take all main EU languages for your leaving cert including Polish, Hugarian, Dutch etc. which given that there is no way an honours leaving cert paper in any of these languages could be anything like as tough for somebody who has grown up speaking them at home, as an honours Irish or honours Engllish paper for a Paddy is massively unfair to Irish Native Students.
Also, because Irish is such an outlier in terms of Indo-European Languges, teaching it and indeed teaching it, appalingly badly from a very young age, is probably not very wise, so starting from about 10 is a better idea with it.

Now watch and see how the teacher's unions move to block this just as they do with all proposed reforms (or grudgingly accept in return for a nice fat payoff).

The unions are the most change-resistant group in Irish society. And the least aligned to the public interest.

Absolutely, there is no such thing as society with these complete and utter gobshytes!
Also from what I gather we have an excess of French teaching graduates, my guess is that almost all those eejits would never be at a level where they would be capable of using the language commercially, so masquerade as French Teachers in our schools instead!

And of course re jobs a lot of jobs which require fluency in another European Language are being advertised by chancer employers for around €18K-€21K, which is absolutely outrageous!

Well, these are modern equivalents of manufacturing jobs. These are call centres jobs. It's good we have them as people can move from manual jobs to these with minimum training.

But you're right, in 5-10 years time they won't be needed due to the apps like www.livechatinc.com . It's already proven customers prefer to use chats over phone for dealing with companies and I guess chats can be operated from anywhere in the world and language skills will no longer be required due to improvements in machine translation.

Well, these are modern equivalents of manufacturing jobs. These are call centres jobs. It's good we have them as people can move from manual jobs to these with minimum training.

But you're right, in 5-10 years time they won't be needed due to the apps like www.livechatinc.com . It's already proven customers prefer to use chats over phone for dealing with companies and I guess chats can be operated from anywhere in the world and language skills will no longer be required due to improvements in machine translation.

We're however not there yet.

I would regard fluency in another language as a skill which should require a premium level payment to an extent!
However, TBH, with a universal translator and every fúcktard ass hole then regarding themselves as fluent in several languages, where they might not in cases be even fluent in one, it will be virtually as impactful as the fall of The Berlin Wall had on East Germans who had the Russian language as their primary offering to the new job market down the line!

I don't get our fixation on languages. English is spoken very, very widely. He should be concentrating his efforts on improving students proficiency in spoken and written English in regards to language. After that, focus on science and maths. Much more important than foreign languages. Other languages have limited appeal.

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